Below is my #SFF2020 interview with Neil Clarke of Clarkesworld. For the complete #SFF2020: The State of Genre Magazines report, including other interviews, or to download the report in Kindle, Epub and PDF formats, go here.
Interview with Neil Clarke, Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of Clarkesworld Magazine
Jason Sanford: I suspect most people in the SF/F genre don’t understand the difficulties of publishing a magazine. What’s one aspect of running a genre magazine you wish more readers and writers knew about?
Neil Clarke: I think it’s probably the case for most creative endeavours – not just magazines – that their fans don’t fully understand the amount of time, energy, and money that goes into creating something. Ideally, you’d have enough people contributing financially (via donations, subscriptions, sponsorships, advertising, etc.) to cover all of the costs, but at the moment, that’s not happening for the majority of genre magazines, particularly those that offer free online editions.
On the surface, it looks like we’re living in a great time for short fiction – there’s a wide array of quality publications to choose from – but when you scratch the surface and look closer at the those publishing online, you’ll discover that less than 10% of the readers are supporting those publications financially. To make ends meet, the staff have been seriously underpaid, if paid at all. No one was forced into this, but it does define the conditions by which these publications can exist and determines who can enter the field. That’s not a healthy state of being. Most readers simply aren’t aware of just how much of a house of cards that ecosystem is at the moment. The good news, however, is that there are significantly more than enough readers to solve this problem should they choose to subscribe or support them financially in some other manner..
Jason: In many ways Clarkesworld helped birth the current movement in online and genre magazines. How have things changed since the founding of Clarkesworld? Would you say it’s harder or easier to run a genre magazine these days?
Neil: It was a very different world for magazines in 2006. Online fiction wasn’t particularly respected. I remember having established authors tell me point-blank they wouldn’t publish online because it was the domain of “newbie writers and pirates.” The year’s best anthologies and various genre awards rarely featured works from those markets. With two-to-three years, that started changing and today, the awards have heavily swung the other direction – something you could reasonably argue is just as problematic.
On the more traditional side of the industry, the major print magazines had been posting declining subscriptions for years. It wasn’t uncommon for new magazines – online or in print – to launch and fold within months. It wasn’t uncommon to see someone say that short fiction was dead or dying. It was a challenging time to launch something and every new publication put its own money on the table.
Since then, we’ve seen three things have completely changed the economics of short fiction and turned things around: Amazon Kindle, Kickstarter, and Patreon. Each has contributed in its own way and made it considerably easier for a new publication to get off the ground. Without them, I don’t think we’d still be around.
At the same time, the increased access and awareness of short fiction – courtesy of free online and digital publications, including podcasts – has led to a tremendous growth in the number of markets, readers, and writers. This explosion has created problems of its own that have been exacerbated by the low paid readership percentages for those publications. That’s not to minimize the positive impacts of these changes. It just means we still have a way to go.
Jason: Clarkesworld was founded thirteen years ago. Does your magazine still require significant volunteer or unpaid time from yourself and your staff?
Neil: Yes and I accept my share of the blame for that. Early on, we prioritized growth – increasing content – but didn’t factor in the cost of our own time. That continued for a long time. For several years now, I’ve been trying to correct that mistake and while I’ve made some progress, we still have a long way to go. Everyone is still seriously underpaid for the hours they put in, myself included.
Jason: You’ve said some of the problems experienced by genre magazines come about because “we’ve devalued short fiction” through reader expectations that they shouldn’t have to pay for short stories. Do you think this situation will ever change? Or could we eventually see a world where all writing, including novel-length fiction, is devalued?
Neil: I tend to talk about devaluation as an umbrella that covers two big problems and probably a bunch of other little ones. You’ve touched on the expectation that short fiction should be free, which seems to represent an alarming percentage of readers, but there’s also a problem with the rates most of us charge for our subscriptions. An average monthly rate of $1.99 or $2.99 is too low. I’ve argued that the starting point should probably be about a dollar higher. That’s something we can start making a case for with those who already understand that these things have value and if that extra dollar was earmarked towards staff pay, you’d see an amazingly significant improvement in the health of those markets.
That’s not to say we should give up on those who don’t see the point in paying for the stories they read and are entertained by. I understand that some of them can’t, but when you are talking about 90% of your audience, it seems unlikely it is true of all of them. Every percentage point you can gain is significant, but it’s very slow and challenging. I’d like to believe it can change, but I have to view it as a long-term goal. The previously mentioned price change is more obviously short-term and fortunately you can work on both at once.
As for novels, that’s not really my area, but it looks like it’s already a “problem” in the indie community – though the bug is a feature for them too. Publishing is full of paradoxes. You can have a company that creates wild library policies that is also willing to publish free online fiction. One is marketing and the other is being robbed by customers, but you can flip them and make intelligent arguments each way.
Jason: It seems to me that many of the genre magazines which have succeeded in recent years have built up a strong community of readers and writers. How important is it for a magazine to build its own community and support it?
Neil: It’s not really a new concept or unique to magazines. Fans have always built communities around the things they love. What’s changed is the tools we’re using for communication have allowed interactions to be more frequent, interactive, and engaging. We’re in a time where one of the measures of success can come from evaluating the community that has grown around it: size and perception. There’s some care and feeding involved, but these tend to be fairly organic.
Authors are a part of that community, but they are actively cultivating their own as well. The result is that it is far more common these days for authors to publish broadly across many magazines instead of working more closely with a specific market or two. That’s really changed some of the overall dynamics of the field.
Jason: Why did you originally want to publish a genre magazine?
Neil: The easy answer is “it seemed like a good idea at the time.” (And I still feel like it was.)
I’ve always been a short fiction junkie. When Clarkesworld launched, I had been running an online genre bookstore for about seven years. The magazine section (over one hundred different publications, many defunct) was my pride and joy. I regularly communicated with some of the editors and, with their permission, I experimented with free online fiction from those magazines as a marketing tool – and it did help.
That experience was one of the factors that led to the creation of the Clarkesworld. I saw this as a way to get more of the types of stories I liked in front of readers and I thought we had come up with a way that wouldn’t bankrupt me. I had no expectations of this becoming a career or lasting this long (which led to some of those poor decisions), but it didn’t take long to hook me. At this point, I can’t imagine doing anything else! If I didn’t love it, I would have retired ages ago.